Review: Torchwood 1.6: Countrycide

The team go camping.

Chris Chibnall is this series' main writer and so far has written every even-numbered episode. All of them share their ambition and all of them have decent sci-fi ideas at their core, but bad dialogue decisions and poor execution have meant that Countrycide is the only once that comes close to reaching its own image. His on-and-off authorship is a smart move on the part of the production team but it does mean that this episode skips over the events of Small Worlds and follows straight on from Cyberwoman. Not a good accolade early on. Countrycide by itself is probably one of the most gruesome episodes of this series, a horror appealing to dark fears about human nature.
      The team head to the middle of the Brecon Beacons, with only one town in a 30 mile radius. They're investigating a spate of 17 disappearances from this one spot, and the team are making sure that aliens aren't involved. They set up camp, and there's a lot of bantering about kissing, noticeably covering Gwen and Owen's snog and the death of Lisa. When Gwen discovers a corpse stripped of all meat and internal organs in the forest, the team is distracted long enough for the strange killers to escape with the SUV.
     Following the SUV's tracking signal, they arrive at the small village of Brynblaidd, where Tosh and Ianto investigate the SUV while Jack, Gwen and Owen look inside a pub. There's nothing there, and so they go next door, where a frightened young boy shoots Gwen, mistaking her for "them." Tosh and Ianto are kidnapped and thrown into a dungeon room with fridges full of human meat. As Owen treats Gwen, Jack finds another person who seems to know something.

Ianto finds some Human meat.

     A creepy old woman comes into Tosh and Ianto's room shaking, telling them that she needs to take them to "them". When they arrive at a butchers' kitchen full of human meat, the true enemies reveal themselves - the villagers of Brynblaidd have a "harvest" every ten years, where they kidnapp and canibalise anyone coming through the area. In a rescue attempt Gwen and Owen get captured as well, but Jack saves the day by storming the place and shooting the villagers in the foot. When Gwen, who's pretty freaked out by the whole caniballism thing, asks the leader of the village why they do this "Harvest," he says only that it makes him happy. At the end of the episode there's a Gwen monologue as it's revealed that she and Owen are bonking.
     While there's certainly something deeply unsettling over seeing (what appears to be) human meat and human carcasses, the mainly scary aspects of this episode were all in the subtext - firstly in the "unseen enemy" that stalked our characters and then in the savagery that Human beings could commit. With the number of atrocities commited in the last 100 years alone, it's not that difficult to image something like this happening and no-one batting an eyelid. For once Chibnall's imagery isn't too heavy handed, as with this level of idea he doesn't need that to get his point across.
     On the character side of things we finally got some development for Toshiko, ready for her Centric episode next time. She's been one of the most potentially interesting characters and yet we only know about her now. Strangely enough, her character is the oldest there, having starred in Doctor Who before Jack. (Eve Myles was in Doctor Who before her but that's hardly the point here.) Gwen and Owen got some lesser development as well, with Gwen getting more used to her new career and giving in to Owen's temptation.

Our enemy doesn't just look human...

     There were of course some of Chibnall's more problematic features. Dialogue like, "When was the last time you came so hard you forgot where you were?" doesn't exactly fill one with a sense of confidence about this episode's quality. The villians were certainly a comment on human nature but despite how horrific humans can be, their motivations felt a little empty. "It made me happy" was chilling but ultimately silly. Typical, then, of Chibnall's episodes.
    Most of all, I'm just disappointed by Countrycide. Like its author's previous stories for Torchwood, the story is based on a brilliant sci-fi idea but doesn't execute it with any of the necessary skill. This time came near to acheiving the blackened image of humanity that it's clearly trying to portray, and at times it is genuinely scary, but once one knows that humans are involved the only horror comes from one's own beliefs about morality and the potential of mankind for evil. So close, yet so far.

Thanks.